


Minor Mending

by thoughtsappear



Category: The Magicians (TV)
Genre: Canon Compliant, Canonical Character Death, Gen, Grief, Sad, eliot & alice friendship, season 5, the only fic i will write that doesn't ignore s4 ep13, they're both so angry
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-08
Updated: 2019-05-08
Packaged: 2020-02-28 17:15:15
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,287
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18760870
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thoughtsappear/pseuds/thoughtsappear
Summary: Eliot comes back.Quentin doesn't.





	Minor Mending

Eliot comes back.

Quentin doesn’t.

Life doesn’t go back to normal, but Eliot finds a way to survive. He focuses on his recovery, pretends the pain is just his flesh knitting back together. But every moment he feels like he can barely breathe. At first, everyone is sympathetic, and everyone steps around him as if he’ll crack at any moment, which is a relief, but also makes his skin crawl. He wants to be treated like a stable person, like he’s not about to fall apart, even if he feels like that sometimes.

Time passes and Eliot thinks he’s gonna make it. Some days are harder than others. Some days he has to drink himself stupid just to make it until lunchtime. 

One day, it happens. He breaks.

He and Alice are in the kitchen at Kady’s, drinking coffee. Alice is one of the few people that he can handle first thing in the morning. She doesn’t put on airs, and she’s probably one of the only people who knows how he feels.

They’re putting away clean coffee cups. Alice can’t reach the second shelf, and he tries to swoop in to help, but instead of grabbing the cup from her, he knocks it out of her hand.

And they watch it fall.

It breaks between them, jagged pieces at their feet, and she swoops down to pick them up.

He’s not thinking, he just says it, “I’ll just do a minor mending…”

Alice’s face crumbles, and she freezes mid sweep. Eliot realizes too late what he’s said, and he reaches out to pat her back. “I’m sorr--”

Alice stands up and shakes her head. Then she does something that both shocks and delights him. She reaches into the cabinet and takes the next mug and hurls it to the ground. Then another, then another. Eliot picks up the sadness and anger and desperation in the gesture. He watches until he can’t watch, and he finds a mug of his own to shatter at their feet. It feels good because it feels like something new. It doesn’t hurt like the axe in his side or the axe in his heart. 

They take turns destroying the mugs until they have a pile of pieces scattered around them. Eliot has never felt so happy, sad and destroyed all at once. Alice is breathing fast, her hair wild around her face, eyes wide beneath glasses that have slipped down her nose. When she blinks there are tears in her eyes, and she scowls at him when she sees him looking. She pushes her glasses back up, smoothes down her hair and stomps off. Eliot is left alone in the remnants of broken dishes. He can’t bear to perform the spell to fix them. 

Instead, he lets his legs buckle and he adds himself to wreckage on the floor, wishing he could scatter into tiny pieces and be swept into a dustbin, or that someone could perform a minor mending and put him back together. 

It’s not until he feels a hand on his back, that he realizes he’s still crumpled into a ball, and he’s been down there for longer than was probably healthy. Margo is peering down at him with that look she reserves for when he’s really gone off the rails, like that time he thought about applying to law school, or that time he decided to donate all his vests to Goodwill. 

“Honey,” she says, and she’s already lifting him out of the mess. “Was there an earthquake?”

He shakes his head and she passes him his cane. Then he takes a deep breath, and does the spell, even though his hands are stiff and his fingers don’t move like they used to. But the magic still works, and they watch as the mugs fit themselves back together. All of them are repaired in a matter of moments, and it’s like they never broke at all. 

Margo shuts the cabinet and smiles. He feels almost warm for a moment. She is really a treasure, but right now, he can’t be her El. He presses a kiss to her forehead, wobbling a little as he leans, and then he sets off on the arduous journey up the stairs. 

It shouldn’t take a man of his age this long to climb a staircase; but then a man of his age doesn’t usually have a gaping stomach wound. He reaches the top, a little winded, but successful, and stumbles toward his room. He’s been sharing with Margo, while Josh is in Fillory. On his way, he passes the room Julia and Alice have been trading. He knows without being told it was also Quentin’s. 

It’s also why he enters the room to find Alice sitting upright in a chair, clutching a shirt. It’s not a shirt that means anything to him, but he knows by looking at it that it was Quentin’s. The same way he can tell the room was his. The same way he can see every fingerprint of Q’s, the same way he can feel his footsteps on the floor, the same way he can smell his aftershave, the same way he can hear his stuttering in the middle of the night.

He sits down next to Alice, holding his side for support. She’s taken off her glasses, and she’s red-eyed and puffy. Her voice is thick with tears and she doesn’t say anything as much as she vocalizes a surprised huff and a clearing of her throat.

She looks at him and he really sees her for a moment. If he didn’t know it for a fact, the expression on her face would tell him that she feels the same way he does. He does the only thing he knows how. He reaches out and wraps her in his embrace. 

He’s been told he’s a good hugger. His height makes it so that most people fit nicely next to him. They can easily rest their heads against his chest or shoulder. Alice slots in like a puzzle piece.

He cries for the second time today. Alice hands him the shirt. He stares at it, trying to conjure up a memory of Q wearing it, but he just comes up empty. He can’t remember anything Quentin ever wore. But he clings to the shirt anyway, and despite feeling silly, he takes a sniff of the collar and nearly collapses. 

It’s the smell of Quentin’s hair. Smelling it now brings so much back, he clenches his fists and inhales it deep. He can’t decide if he wants to punch a wall or himself. He just keeps breathing in the smell, and even though his hands are fisted tight, he swears he can feel those silky strands slip through his fingers. 

Like the mugs, he wants to destroy the evidence of the memory, and his fingers itch to make a fire spell. Fire is the kind of thing that takes more than a minor mending to repair. It would burn the shirt to ash in just a matter of seconds. 

But then he wouldn’t have this smell. He lets go of Alice, and puts the shirt down in her lap. Everything is too raw right now, and he needs to be alone, to blast something angry and offensive to drown out all the thoughts in his head. 

Alice doesn’t try to make him stay, and he hobbles into his room. He collapses on his back, feeling the steady beating of his heart as he lays a trembling hand on his chest. It doesn’t seem possible that it should still work. Eliot’s heart has broken so many times that no kind of mending, minor or not, would ever repair it. 


End file.
